What’s New in Ephesoft 3.1 (part 3)

Ian Schumann

May 31, 2014

So far in our survey of Ephesoft’s 3.1 release, we’ve focused mainly on powerful new features that extend the reach and capability of the application. But, Ephesoft has also taken good notes on user behavior and experience, and packed the 3.1 release with a lot of small interface tweaks. We’re happy to see that these will speed up general usage of the application, and just create a more cohesive UX altogether. In this post we’ll present a quick summary of some of our favorites among these new additions.

Batch Pagination and Sorting

All column headers on the Batch Instance and Batch Class index pages can now be used as Sort By operators. For some of our clients with busy Production environments, running dozens or hundreds of batches at a time, this is an immediate win.

Any of these column headers can now be used to Sort the entire batch (or batch class) list.

Interface Themes!

There’s a new button in the top-right of the Ephesoft UI that enables 8 alternate color sets to be applied across the entire Ephesoft interface. Why is this valuable? Aside from allowing firms to change Ephesoft’s hues to be a little more on-brand (not a problem for Blue Fish), this feature can be used to quickly distinguish between various parallel instances of Ephesoft. One color can signify Test, another Dev, another Production, and so forth. This mitigates the all too common problem of environment confusion due to browser-tab overload.

The theming button is highlighted in the top-right. This screenshot was captured from our rival firm, Red Fish.

New Home Screen & Timeout Warning

Ephesoft 3.1’s slick new home screen & landing page

Ephesoft now has a proper landing screen, which lives at /dcma/home.html. This allows both admins and operators to get oriented and not have to bookmark specific locations in the app, or commit them to memory.

Tying into that new feature is a very welcome timeout warning in the UI, which now presents itself to users several minutes before the session expires. Previously it was possible for a session to time out quietly without the screen updating. This allowed users to unknowingly continue with client-side changes via the application UI — the next time changes were pushed to the server, the UI would revert back to the login screen, and those recent changes would be lost. But in 3.1, not only will users be warned due to inactivity, but the screen will default back to the new landing page in the event of an actual timeout. No more accidental unsaved changes!

Conclusion

Altogether we’re pleased with the new UI tweaks, as they address common-sense UX areas that will genuinely improve everyday usage of the application. We appreciate that Ephesoft is committed not just to developing new headline-worthy system features, but rewarding the current user base and making them more successful themselves.

In the remainder of this series, we will look into Ephesoft 3.1’s new table extraction features, and improved system logging. Stay tuned.